Help Unknown stream audio comming from phone, need hidden Process & app monitoring, & general security.

[Basher93]

Greetings,

My mothers phone has run in to an unusual bug or has been compromised. At random points it will start playing sounds of what appears to be a stream or something in someones living room, the sounds of people talking in the background and some louder closer to the other device, like a party. The sounds will happend when the device is locked and will persist when unlocked, when on the home screen or any app. The sound responds to the media volume slider. My first instinct when hearing it happen for myself would be that this is not some kind hack or security breach, but rather a bug with youtube or facebook running in the background and playing a livestream of some sort. No apps are (visibly) open or running in the background.

I tried to look around the appstore for apps that would help me show hidden processes or could show me what exactly is producing sound at the moment it happens again or what is using wifi bandwith (because the audio must be coming form somewhere so it should be visible on checking bandwith). However i have not really found the exact type of app i think would be helpfull. So i ask if anyone knows of a good process monitoring app that could be helpfull in showing what is running in this exact moment.

I have scanned with malwarebytes and it came up empty. One of the monitoring apps claime that the facebook app had used over 1Gb of traffic today alone, even though it claims to only have use around 3.5Gb the whole past year. I am not to sure how accurate the claim of this app is, but regardless it would corroberate my suspiscioun this audio is coming from a bug in the facebook app. When i open the facebook app it shows nothing special playing, just her standard wall. In the meantime i have deleted the facebook app just to check if it happens again.

So what i would really need to help me is recomendations on apps that cleanly and easily show me:
-what process/app is playing audio right now
-what process/app is using bandwith
-what processes and apps are currently actively doing something.

Other general advice about security and scanning is also welcome.
I have never had to worry about security myself, as a millenial i know my way around the web and have only ever downloaded apps from the play store.
But my mother on the other hand, despite my best attempts to teach her how to install an app from the appstore claims it's to difficult, but it is far easier to click "download" on a shady websites.
However that being said i did interrogate her about anything she might have installed recently and the only recent thing was the official Weight Watchers app from the playstore, and these occurences have only started recently, so it doesn't seem like it's a rogue shady app.

Anyhows, bug or compromised, i hope to find out soon.

Thanks.


Edit: also weird detail, the voices we hear are in english, and we are not english speakers. So it can't be a stream or whatsapp call from local friends.

 

[puppykickr]

First, ditch all that 'securityware'.
It is snakeoil.
Android neds none of it, and the device will run better without it.

Now, open your developers options.
Some devices are diffrent, but the general gist of it is

Settings
System
About phone
(tap this 7 times)

Now go back to settings and system, and near the bottom should be Developers options.

Select that, and switch it on.

Scroll down and you will see something like View Running Apps.

Select that.

Now that you know where it is, the next time this happens you can see everything that is running.

My personal guess, as something similar happened to me once long ago, is that a game she plays has downloaded an ad that sometimes will play in the background.

In fact, it could be (also from experience) background sounds from some news source she was watching with her browser or an app.

Junk like this can get stored and then pop up at random times.

I havent seen it for quite some time, but ike I said, it is only a guess.

 

[Dannydet]

Just do a factory reset and backup anything she may need before the reset.
That'll fix many issues

 

[Basher93]

Thanks, those developer controlls look like just what i need. Now to wait and see if it pops back up again. That's the tricky one because it's not actually my phone.

I can say though it is definetly not an add form some app running. It's as i described in the post. It was weird because it sounded like we where the hackers listening in on someone who was unaware.
But i guessed it more sounded like somebody facebook livestreaming a party.

 

[Deleted User]

Down load net sevure its a VPN fire wall app. Pay for it and block all traffic and view the logs. There are at least 3 ports that i kbow have vulnerabilities i only know the nuumbers not how to exploit the. Samsung won't help. Message me . Start with net guard

 

[puppykickr]

Down load net sevure its a VPN fire wall app. Pay for it and block all traffic and view the logs. There are at least 3 ports that i kbow have vulnerabilities i only know the nuumbers not how to exploit the. Samsung won't help. Message me . Start with net guard

NoRoot Firewall will do the same thing for free.

But nothing will show up in a firewall log unless it is from online.

 

[puppykickr]

Thanks, those developer controlls look like just what i need. Now to wait and see if it pops back up again. That's the tricky one because it's not actually my phone.

I can say though it is definetly not an add form some app running. It's as i described in the post. It was weird because it sounded like we where the hackers listening in on someone who was unaware.
But i guessed it more sounded like somebody facebook livestreaming a party.

This news source that I use used to have an annoying feature.

I would click on a link, and as it was loading, a window would pop up with a video that would take forever to load.
So I would start to read the article, and once the video loaded everything scrolled back to the top to that pest of a window- where the story I was just reading is replayed word for word, slowly, with pictures, and an annoying soundtrack.

Needless to say, this was extremely aggrevating, as I was oten already half way through the article when this would happen.

Anyway, this stupid, annoying soundtrack was so low to almost go unnoticed.

And sometimes, it would just start playing out of nowhere, even if I was not on that news site. It must have been getting stored inside the cache of the browser. And since I use that browser all the time, it is almost always active.

After a few profane e-mails, they finally decided to ditch the whole video window, thank God.

Haven't had the issue since.